January 29, 2012

Week of Gaming #69 - 01/28/12

A few big play-sessions of Batman: Arkham Asylum have put that game on top of my list this week - I've been off of Starcraft 2 for almost 7 days, which is an interesting dip in my interests curve.

Games of note this week:

1 - Batman: Arkham Asylum

2 - Bit.Trip Saga (3DS)

3 - Magi

4 - Blood Bowl: Legendary Edition

5 - Triple Town

Triple Town

This past week I earned 3.5 Million points in Triple Town - my best score by far. It's hard to remember much about the game, as I played that single town for more than 2 weeks, but I know I had at least 2 Ninja Bear re-sets (where you deliberately fill the board, in order to kill all the ninja bears) and ended up buying everything in the store.

I can see by my web traffic counter that my guide to Triple Town is getting decent traffic - which hopefully means more people will start to rock the leaderboards.

Blood Bowl: Legendary Edition

My Necro team is still going strong - I've been so pleased with the game that I even made a Viking team to play...

Unfortunately I now remember how frustrating BB can be - I haven't been able to win a single game with the Vikings, and it's almost put me off the game entirely. Apparently getting at least a few PP to start adding skills & building a team is an essential hook for the game. That's obvious in retrospect, but I'm surprised to feel it so clearly as a direct experience.

Magi

Oh goodness I love Magi. My recent obsession has been with playing the Sorceress Class - I've never achieved the elusive 50 victories, and I really would like to do so. The secret to success is to put your Edge stat very low to start - and increase Intelligence rapidly. That really hurts with folks wit Incantation Edge - but the sorceress has such a powerful blasting game early on that I haven't really had any troubles.

Bit.Trip Saga (3DS)

I had a great mind-meld with Alex Neuse back when he was hired to do the DS port of Godzilla: Unleashed, so I've always been rooting for Gaijin games. The fact that they've built a recognizable brand and had a successful run wit the Bit.Trip games hasn't hurt! I picked up the all-in-one collection for the 3DS, so I can finally play all the games back and forth. My favorite right now is Core - although the first boss kills me every time. It's really clear - playing all the games together - that the trend was to make the games easier over time. That's a bit of a slippery slope - it comes off a bit amateurish when viewed all at once.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

After waiting so long to actually play this game - I've been loving it to death. My son has even been sitting to watch me play - which we haven't done together in months. He even corrected me the other day - I referred to an object as a "Bane canister" and he corrected me by saying "You mean a TITAN canister!"

He's so right about that.

All the new gadgets and combat tricks are still just a bit overwhelming - I remember how hard it was for me to get the "use all of your moves in one battle" achievement in the original, and with so many new moves... at least the gadgets have been broken into their own list.

I love the grapple boost move - it really makes it a blast to cruise around the city. It's almost (almost!) as awesome as the two-trigger web movement in Spider-Man 2.

My only advice thus far for players is this - get your melee armor up early, and keep your ballistic armor low as long as possible. Melee armor is essential for getting practice (you fight a LOT in this game), but ballistic armor just allows you to sort of ignore areas where you need to be stealthy. Not learning those stealth tactics will really hurt you later on - so deal with the frustrating of learning to do them properly the first time.